Web-based personalization and management of interactive video

This paper describes an application framework for providing and managing personalized, interactive video on the web. The application framework enables content providers and aggregators to stream personalized content to end-users. The server stores video and multimedia content that is structured and profiled. The content profile is matched against an end-user’s interest profile to determine which parts of the video to include and what hotspots and hyperlinks to provide to the user. The server generates SMIL files that represent the personalized content and returns their unique URLs to the client when responding to end-user requests. This paper also describes how the application framework is implemented by the HotStreams system. HotStreams is implemented using the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). HotStreams is eCommerce and micropayment enabled and provides the means for content providers to specify the value of the content down to the level of individual video clips. This allows the content provider to charge for the parts of the video that the end-user actually viewed or received. The HotStreams application includes web-based management tools that enable content managers to manage multimedia objects, to compose, structure, and profile the content, to create and profile hotspots and hyperlinks, and to manage pricing information and advertisements. The management tools are implemented in the form of Java applets that run inside a web browser.